Telstra (Melbourne, Australia), a network carrier, on Thursday announced it would invest more than $800 million in cloud computing over the next five years to support the growing demand from Australian organizations for cloud services.

As part of the announcement, Telstra CEO David Thodey unveiled more corporate customers who use Telstra cloud computing including Australian Vintage Limited, The Salvation Army Employment Plus, Oz Minerals, Tabcorp, and Tristar Medical Group.

“Sales of our T-Suite software-as-a-service have grown threefold for the past year and use of our infrastructure cloud has increased by nearly 50 % this year,” said Thodey. “We are also experiencing strong sales in our cloud voice and video services, which are exceeding 80 % per year and we now manage more than 100,000 IP telephony services delivered from the cloud.”

For the past 12 months Telstra has been speaking to more than 160 Australian organizations about their cloud computing needs with many of these beginning to move into the cloud.

The $800 million expenditure will be within the company’s 14 % capital expenditure to sales ratio and will include:

the building of a new Australian data center;

modernizing facilities at existing Telstra data centers;

expanding the range of enterprise applications;

a new online account management portal;

increased automation of utility computing services; and

enhanced T-Suite capabilities and new applications.

Telstra has partnered with cloud technology vendors Cisco, VMware and its integration market partner Accenture, to build the next phase of its integrated cloud platform as well as using cloud technology partners such as Microsoft to deliver cloud services.